On Murdoch’s New ‘Fox Nation’, Same Old Rogue’s Gallery

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On November 27, Fox News launches Fox Nation, a 24/7 streaming service for the “Fox News superfan.” In addition to historical specials and apolitical cooking shows, the streaming service — which shares a name with a defunct Fox website — will provide unlimited right-wing misinformation to millions of homes across the United States. Many Fox Nation hosts are also on Fox News or Fox Business, where Media Matters has compiled their extensive records of bigotry, misinformation, and conspiracy theories.

Tomi Lahren: Lahren is a former host on One America News Network and Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze who gained attention for attacking liberal activist “snowflakes” and for a winding, viral rant about President Barack Obama and “radical Islam.” Lahren was suspended by TheBlaze after she told The View that she supported Americans right to have legal access to abortion; she then washed up on Fox News as a contributor, mostly limited to appearances on Hannity and Fox & Friends. Here are some of Lahren’s most odious takes, which will likely multiply now that she is the face of Fox Nation.

Lahren called Black Lives Matter “the new KKK” in a since-deleted tweet.

Lahren claimed that the Black Entertainment Television network’s “definition of a humanitarian is someone who perpetuates a war on cops.”

After activists planned “A Day Without Immigrants” protest to show the importance of immigrants in American daily life, Lahren ludicrously claimed that “a day without illegal immigrants means a safer America for us all, as illegal immigrants are three times as likely to be convicted of murder as members of the general population.” (They are not.)

Lahren said that female activists planning an all-woman general strike were not “real women” because “real women don’t have to remind the world every single day that history once slighted us. Real women don’t wake up and skip work to march for abortions or paid contraceptives.” Lahren also said that she appreciated “a day without this nasty feminist BS masqueraded as women’s rights,” and claimed feminists use the obstacles women face as “an excuse to fall short.”

Lahren incorrectly characterized a college course to complain that teachers are “spending more time with their liberal indoctrination than they are actually teaching things that are very important, like math.”

Lahren dismissed professor Christine Blasey Ford, who reported that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school, writing, “Decades-old allegations against Kavanaugh come out just days before a vote….victim or opportunist?”

Lahren told Fox & Friends viewers that “anyone who sits right of center, anyone who’s a Trump supporter, we’re all targets” of the left’s attacks, saying, “If you’re on the right, [you] should be concerned and in danger.”

After he criticized Trump, Lahren dismissed rapper Jay-Z for rapping about “bitches and sisters” and bragging about “selling crack.” Lahren said Jay-Z should “go back to rapping your filthy lyrics and celebrating your drug-dealing resume” instead of trying to “stir up resentment” with “some made-up [charges of] racism.”

Lahren said that nobody should “get to come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language, and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice.”

Lahren called CNN’s Ana Navarro “disgusting and vile” for highlighting first lady Melania Trump’s hypocritically leading an anti-bullying initiative without “any sense of shame for her husband’s use of the Presidency to bully others.”

Lahren exploited the memory of 9/11 to attack kneeling NFL players, writing, “17 years ago Americans of all races, backgrounds, and political affiliations came together under the flag to comfort one another, hold our nation together and fight for our values as Americans. Today we have high-paid athletes who refuse to even stand to honor those values.”

Britt McHenry: McHenry is a former sports reporter who worked at ESPN, where her most notable impact was her 2015 suspension when a video of her berating and threatening a towing company employee went viral. After she was fired in a round of 2017 layoffs, McHenry claimed in a since-deleted tweet that ESPN fired her because she had “been openly conservative.” In 2018, she tweeted that ESPN fired her because she was white before also deleting that tweet. Earlier this year, McHenry was given a weekend show on FOX 5 DC, one of few local Fox stations owned and operated by the Fox News Channel. She has written for The Federalist and Fox News’ website, and has also appeared on Fox channels as a commentator. In July, the network directly hired her for Fox Nation.

McHenry’s smattering of opinion pieces are mostly focused on attackingBlackathletesfor protestingpolice brutality. She also tokenized a Black police officer defending white supremacists as evidence that “Blue lives do matter.” (McHenry’s column barely mentioned Heather Heyer, the anti-racist protester murdered by a white supremacist at the same rally.)

Rachel Campos-Duffy: Campos-Duffy is a Fox News contributor and frequent guest co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend. She is perhaps best known as a cast member on MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco in 1994.) She is married to Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy, formerly a cast member of the Boston edition of The Real World.

On Fox, Campos-Duffy has argued that Kavanaugh was a victim of racial and gender profiling, that “conservatives are the ones who really know what it feels like” to be targeted by “hate” after a serial bomber targeted a series of Democrats, and that LaVar Ball’s criticism of Trump was “an example of really bad parenting.” She defended Trump’s exploitation of a school shooting to attack the FBI, cited Frederick Douglass to call social justice causes as “Marxist causes,” hailed Vice President Mike Pence as “a man ahead of his time” for refusing to be alone around women other than his wife, defended a congressman’s physical assault of a journalist as “Montana justice,” and denounced 8-year-olds for kneeling during the national anthem, saying, “This is shameful.”

David Webb: Webb is a conservative talk radio host and a Fox contributor. He likened Black Democrats to slaves, blamedDemocrats and Black Lives Matter for shootings of police officers, and claimed BLM is violent. He criticized Obama for hosting the rapper Common at a White House event, calling it part of “class and ethnic … warfare.” He also attacked Black liberals as racist, saying civil rights activist Al Sharpton is “someone who clearly is a racist” and thatThe Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart is “the next generation of race pimp.”

Webb on Fox complained about Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance, saying she “used a moment at the Super Bowl, when you should leave politics out of it, when you should celebrate one of the greatest games ever played through the year, and she turns it into a political agenda.”

Eric Shawn: Shawn is a Fox News anchor and senior correspondent who has been with the network since it launched. He currently co-hosts America’s News Headquarters on weekends and is an occasional guest host of the weekday America’s Newsroom. Shawn was Fox’s point person for election fraud coverage in the 2012 and 2014 election cycles, during which he supportedsuppressivevoter ID laws and pushed the myth of widespreadvoter fraud, at one point hosting an hourlong special on it and creating an email tip line for voter fraud.

Hannity was a driving force behind the conspiracy theory about the killing of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. National shaming and a lawsuit from the Rich family forced Fox to retract its news reporting pushing the theory, and Hannity initially claimed that he was also done discussing Rich “for now.” But he returned to the conspiracy theory just one week later, and continued to reference it on air.

Dana Perino: Perino is a former Republican official who joined Fox News in 2009 after serving as the last press secretary for President George W. Bush. She started at Fox as a frequent panelist, but eventually graduated to co-host duties on The Five and now also hosts her own midday show, The Daily Briefing.

Ainsley Earhardt: Earhardt is a co-host of Fox & Friends who joined the network in 2007, originally in a recurring segment called “Ainsley Across America” on Sean Hannity’s show. Earhardt started as Fox & Friends co-host in March 2016, and has been a vocal Trump defender. She’s claimed that “you can’t even really blame an administration” for its family separation policy, falsely claimed that nobody cares about Trump’s hush money for adult film actor and director Stormy Daniels, and lied about a proposed Republican Obamacare replacement as “affordable” and covering “everyone.”

Earhardt has also criticized Jay-Z for “complaining about white privilege” even though “we had a Black president for eight years”; called history-making Vermont gubernatorial candidate Christine Hallquist “that transgender”; defended Kavanaugh by claiming that Ford “wasn’t sexually assaulted”; and suggested that White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was the victim of “discrimination” when a restaurant denied her service. She has even made the patently absurd claim that Fox & Friends doesn’t give Trump “soft interviews.”

Brian Kilmeade: Kilmeade joined Fox News in 1997 and soon became a co-host of Fox & Friends, a position he still holds. Kilmeade has used racist rhetoric on air, from his comments about Americans not having “pure genes” because “we keep marrying other species and other ethnics,” to asking a Black colleague if she makes Kool-Aid with her peach cobbler. In early 2007, Kilmeade helped push the false claim that Obama was raised a Muslim and had attended a madrassa as a child, which he and his co-hosts later apologized for. He also made numerous bigoted anti-Muslim remarks on both Fox News and his radio show, suggesting that the U.S. military interrogate all of its Muslim service members and civilian employees to make sure that they’re not terrorists, defending profiling of Muslims, and falsely claiming “all terrorists are Muslims.” More recently, Kilmeade defended Trump’s family separation policy at the border, saying, “These aren’t our kids.”

In addition to pushing racism and religious bigotry, Kilmeade is a climate denier who said the settled science of climate change is a “point of view” and called climate scientists “corrupt.”

Kilmeade has also habitually madesexist comments on air, referring to women as “babes, chicks,” and “skirts.” In 2012, he described the hiring process for his female co-workers: “We go into the Victoria’s Secret catalogue and we said, ‘Can any of these people talk?’”

Jesse Watters: Watters is a co-host on Fox’s talk show The Five and also has his own weekend show Watters’ World. He began working for O’Reilly a year after he joined Fox, and eventually became his trollish minion on The O’Reilly Factor. He produced a mocking, dehumanizing segment on New York’s homeless population; starred in an incredibly racist segment shot in Chinatown, New York, that drew nationwidescorn; and violated a liberal reporter’s privacy by trailing her and filming her on vacation. Watters has c lied about harassment and violence at Trump rallies, encouraged the president’s authoritarian impulses, and made excuses for Trump’s racism. He is also a climate denier who claimed that “No one is dying from climate change.” Watters also claims that global warming cannot be happening because it snows.

Pete Hegseth: Hegseth is a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend and a U.S. Army National Guard veteran who initially served at a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba before being deployed to combat duty in Iraq and later a training role in Afghanistan. After serving in the military, Hegseth headed a Koch-funded veteran super PAC, but left amid allegations he’d wasted a third of the PAC’s funds on lavish Christmas parties and reimbursements for himself. Hegseth finally joined Fox News in 2014, where he eventually became a Trump favorite. Hegseth frequently echoes the president’s attacks on the media and his climate denial. Hegseth has repeatedlybeen floated as a possible secretary of Veterans Affairs, and he has advised the president and VA secretary on policy.

Greg Gutfeld: Gutfeld has worked as an editor at several magazines, including Men’s Health and the U.K. edition of Maxim. He was a HuffPost contributor from shortly after its inception to 2008, and he began hosting Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld on Fox News in 2007. Two years later, Gutfeld caused international controversy on Red Eye by mocking Canadian contributions to counterterrorism a few days after four Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Despite this, he was promoted in 2011 to co-hosting The Five and eventually replacedRed Eye with his own wide-ranging weekend program, The Greg Gutfeld Show. During his time on The Five, Gutfeld has called for anti-abortion violence, comparing abortion to slavery and saying “if you are pro-life and you believe it is murder, you should be willing to fight” and “start a war” over it. Gutfeld has also denied the scientific consensus on global warming and claimed that “the facts about the high temperatures … is all B.S.”

Katie Pavlich: Pavlich is an editor at the right-wing website Townhall, a Fox News contributor, and occasional guest host of Fox & Friends and Outnumbered. Pavlich, also a former National Review Washington fellow, first gained attention in 2013 for her conspiratorial and sometimes falsehood-ridden coverage of Operation Fast and Furious, a botched attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to crack down on gun trafficking from the U.S. to Mexico. While the incompetence of some low-level ATF officials caused the ATF to lose track of firearms they hoped to trace to high-level Mexican drug cartel leaders, Pavlich wrote a book making the baseless allegation that the failed gun trafficking sting was actually an attempt by attorney general Eric Holder and other high-level DOJ officials (acting on behalf of President Obama) to create a pretext for more restrictive gun laws in the U.S.

Laura Ingraham: Laura Ingraham is a Fox News prime-time host and a right-wing talk radio personality. Ingraham began her media career by outing gay students at Dartmouth College, and since then has held a variety of media jobs, including twofailed stints hosting a TV show and a longtime gig as a Fox News contributor. In 2017 Fox gave her a prime-time slot with The Ingraham Angle.

Steve Hilton: Hilton, a former adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron, has been a Fox host since 2017 with his own show, The Last Revolution. Upon joining Fox, Hilton quit the crowdfunding website Crowdpac after Democratic clients complained.. Hilton styles himself as a populist, and praised Trump’s attacks on current Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan. Hilton called climate activists “the biggest threat to the environment today.” He also argued that the desegregation of public schools, reaffirming Black Americans’ constitutional rights to equal treatment under the law, should have been “on the ballot” instead of decided by the Supreme Court.

Marie Harf: Harf is a co-host of Outnumbered and a Fox News Radio show with Guy Benson. She is a veteran of Obama’s re-election campaign who later worked as a spokesperson for the CIA and the State Department and an adviser to then-Secretary of State John Kerry. She joined Fox in 2017 as the liberal foil to conservative-stacked panels, where she occasionally finds success in debunking Fox News talking points.

Guy Benson:Benson is an editor at Townhall, a Fox News Radio host, a Fox News contributor, and a regular #OneLuckyGuy on Outnumbered. During the 2016 Republican primaries heopposedTrump but quickly changed his tune after the election. Benson has repeatedly attacked Planned Parenthood, calling it an “abortion machine” and describing its former President Cecile Richards as the “radical chief abortion lobbyist.” Following a fatal shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015, Benson accused the organization of “butchery” and decried Democrats’ calls for Republicans to stop baseless probes of Planned Parenthood. During the 2017 special election for an Alabama Senate seat, Benson repeatedly misrepresented Democratic Sen. Doug Jones’ position on abortion. Recently, Benson defended Kavanaugh against reports of sexual assault, saying, “I don’t know how it would be remotely just to derail the nomination.”

In 2003 Carlson railed against Fox News, saying that “it’s hard to imagine” that he could ever work for them. When asked about Fox hosts using “a blowhard, black-and-white approach that strictly follows a partisan line,” Carlson replied: “Well, what I think the problem is in general and, not just with Fox, but the genre, is that it encourages you to use a straw man … We really try to be above that.” He added: “I don’t like partisanship because it abets lying. And I think you burn out fast when you demagogue.”